especkman

I think the key is the meaning of the word "distribute." I believe it is generally accepted that using MySQL in a web based application provided as a service doesn't constitute distribution (though there are some questions about situations when the app is hosted on servers operated by a 3rd party).

In some countries (Germany for example), students have been herded into career tracks at a fairly early age. So, some 13 year old may be sent on a path towards becoming an auto mechanic, while another is guided off to become a surgeon or some other professional. I'm sure there are ways to break out of your track, but there is a big formalized system working against you.

In the US, someone can spend all of high school in auto shop, and still have a chance of changing directions and ending up with a successful career at 33 that some bureaucrat never would never have predicted 20 years earlier. If may take him longer than the kid whose parents and teachers were guiding them towards medicine or business from age 13, but the doors are open.

I think this is a strength of the US, both economically, and with respect to various liberal, democratic, egalitarian ideals. It isn't perfect though. There are certainly people would be happier and better off if they started learning a trade at an earlier age.

He doesn't learn from mistakes.

As noted, these influences can be very disentangle from any real-world analysis.

There was an interesting study a few years back that looked at the "outcomes" of a cohort of people who had all been admitted to an Ivy League school. Part of the study group attended and graduated from the Ivy League school they were admitted to. The control group ended up matriculating elsewhere for whatever reason.

Past studies showed at a significant improvement in earning potential for Ivy League grads, but they didn't have a distinguished control group. What this recent study found was that for most students of similar qualification (all judged to be Ivy League material by the admissions boards at Ivy Leage schools), attending an Ivy conferred no obvious advantage compared to attending a non-Ivy.

The only difference was for students who came from more challenging backgrounds, those whose families may have flirted with poverty and/or didn't have significant educational attainment. In those cases, attending an Ivy conferred some advantage over going elsewhere.

The government used to have more involvement in the student loan programs. My father started up a non-profit under the state board of regents to service guaranteed student loans in Utah in the late 70s or early 80s after the feds passed some big program. They did quite well for a few years, until the regents made them transfer everything to various banks and shut the thing down because it had the potential to be fabulously profitable.

It's a fair outer bound to place. I just like to be really clear about the fact that people don't necessarily pay sticker price at private schools. I've volunteered for my alma mater at college fairs and there are a lot of people who are interested and then freak when they see the tuition. I have to imagine that there are an equal number who don't even stop by our table because they've done just enough research to think "expensive."

Yeah, I'm glad we haven't formalized that system in the US.

Let me propose the radical idea that a college education is not solely justified by it's monetary value.

You do know that a lot of people going to private schools aren't paying full-price, right?

Need based financial aid grants are often available (ie not loans) and sometimes they are substantial. I've known people who have paid less for a private school than they would have at a state school.

And I really need to finish doing something with iminuriphone.com

Handy iPhone binaries for Apache & Python 2.5: http://iphone.natetrue.com/

Concerned why? Are you concerned about someone stealing your proprietary code?

Or are you worried because you have made unreleased proprietary modifications to GPLed code and you are worried that running your modified version on another parties servers might be considered "distribution," and give the host the option of distributing it to other parties?

I don't know about data warehousing with spatial data, but two guys I was taking two a couple of months ago were both working on web apps that worked with geospatial data. Both of them were using postgres for geospatial use and endorsed it over both mySQL and MS-SQL.

How's it been working with the AppleTV? I know Apple stripped out a bunch of stuff that wasn't needed by their apps in a software update, but people are still installing 3rd party stuff on it.

They could have started an arms race with the iPhone hackers with their first update, but they didn't really do anything other than force people with hacks to wipe their phone because the OS wasn't image wasn't in a known state. With any luck, that's all they'll continue to do. We'll have to wait and see. AT&T might be a cranky partner.

Who was it at Google who had the sense to clone Overture's business model, I wonder.

Have you had any content up on the domain before this?

Google tries to get news items into the index quickly, but that doesn't mean they are doing it from newly discovered sites. Part of the reason they crawl sites frequently is that the site has new content every time the crawler visits. I'm sure it also doesn't help if the site has something other than a baseline pagerank.

Also keep in mind that at some point in the past year or two, Google appeared to give better pagerank to sites on domains whose registration was paid up more than a year in advance.

Why is the interesting? Some weak marketing speak (oh, but with attitude) and no product I can actually try without giving them my contact info and hoping they pick me (please, oh please, pick me, please)

BTW, I've never used Akismet because I started using Spamkarma2 before Akismet became standard. SK2 has done an excellent job for me. It scores spam using a bunch of different tests, including an encrypted javascript payload.

I've had very few false positives or negatives.

Why is that the obvious implication, especially whith the two home-run examples he gives?

Starbucks and Microsoft are built on smaller transactions than one would expect from enterprise software. Starbucks does it $3 at a time. Microsoft established itself selling desktop software for for a few hundred a pop, and for quite a while, it was selling a couple of copies at a time until they gained enough momentum to sell their desktop software to whole departments and later even whole enterprises.

Interesting to consider that the average annual revenue Starbucks gets from a regular customer, is probably similar, or even a bit more than the annual revenue Microsoft gets per-seat from its best enterprise customers. A reminder that one should balance the difficulty of acquiring a customer against the lifetime value of that customer.

Getting $1 from a million people might be a tough business, but getting $20/year from 50,000 people one dollar at a time is conceivable.

Flickr might be a good example (though a little on the big side). When they were acquired by Yahoo, just a little over a year from their debut, they already had ~400,000 registered users. Within a few more months, they had a million, and a few months after that a million more. I'd postulate that nearly all of that post-acquisition growth (and much more) came from existing momentum rather than their association with Yahoo.

I don't know if the same ratios held back then, but when I looked a few months back, about 15% of flickr accounts were flickr pro accounts bringing in $24.95 in annual revenue. Thats 300,000 x $24.95, or $7M in annual revenue, just from pro accounts.

Margins were low, or negative, because they were going for growth, but they had various knobs they could twiddle. First off, a little after the Yahoo acquisition they cut the pro subscription price (by half, I believe). In addition, they controlled the amount of storage and upload bandwidth available to both free and pro account holders. Taken together these variables gave them latitude in picking margins. Even a relatively paltry 13% margin would have generated $1M in profit.

Nice hyping.

Nice business they've built for themselves, isn't it?

On the other hand, you aren't counting all the raw meat they have to feed the goons they use to keep acts and venues from straying.

You can turn it down, but not off, as far as I can tell. Actually, even turning it down didn't make much difference. It looks a bit odd.

I've blogged about this. What most of these commentaries seem to miss is that the material cost of the AppleTV is only going to drop since the hardware requirements aren't going to change much.

Look at the bill of materials. There are $100 tied up in CPU, Chipset GPU & network chip. How much will that cost in 18 months?

At this point, there are over 150M adults online in the US. I doubt a large % of them will end up installing adblock.

Keep in mind too, blocking ads isn't necessarily a rational decision for a lot of people in a lot of situations. We can put aside the fact that ads provide economic incentive for the content people are looking for.

The important thing is that ads are often gateways to the things people are looking for (with is one of the points of the article). People buy goods and services. Ads provide a way for people to find sellers of the goods and services they want.

The advertising driven business model is an extremely old one, and I don't think it's going anywhere. People have always had the capacity to ignore advertising, even without technology -- the human brain is very selective about the information it processes and retains.

Some advertising works subliminally/emotionally (most brand advertising), but highly targeted ads, particularly context sensitive pay per click ads aren't generally in that category. They work when people are looking for something, much like the ads from local car dealers in the local paper, which most people ignore completely unless they have an inclination or outright need for a new car.

I don't think your experiment supports your conclusions.

I don't think your assumption that it only works for dumb searchers is supported, since nothing in your materials & methods suggests that searchers were in your experimental or control groups.

All your evidence supports is that adsense does seem to work for the sorts of people who click on link spam. It may be reasonable to assume, based on their behavior, that those people are dumb. It's unreasonable to conclude, based on the behavior of greedy people who click on link spam, that anyone who clicks on a Google ad is dumb.

Check out the article on ad dynamics by the creator of the Metafilter family of sites that I posted a link to. He has a better reasoned theory about when ads work, and when they don't.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=25710

Well, lets start with comparables:

1) Which sites have seen their traffic grow to millions of visitors daily within a few days of launch. I can't think of any, but you must have a few in mind.

2) What did they do or fail to do to handle that growth?

1. I think the news.ycombinator.com crowd is a really poor proxy for the 150M Americans on line.

2. People's ad blindness depends, at least in part, on the situation. Some sites hide context sensitive ads for registered/regular users, because they know that such users aren't likely to click on them. The users who are most likely to click on them are people who are actively searching for information, such as people who arrived by clicking on a search result. If they don't find the information they are looking for, they are going to move on. If the ad displayed is relevant, it presents an attractive place to move on to.

For my part, I usually completely ignore all the paid placements on the Google search results, but when I'm shopping for something, I'll click on the ads if people seem to have what I'm looking for.

Is rejection of authority more common now? The stereotypical Millennial (according to marketers and social scientists who do lots of polling) has more respect for authority than either "Gen Xers" or baby boomers.

The same people will argue that todays 20-somethings are more collaborative and also less patient. One could argue that these latter characteristics might foster entrepreneurship.

What I think is most important is: 1. Demographics. There are a lot of "young adults" these days, and typically the young have a greater tolerance for risk. They typically don't have mortgages or kids.

2. Expectations. ~15 years ago we saw the first wave of "downsizing." Previously, people had reasonable expectation that if they were loyal to their employer, their employer would be loyal to them. Todays young adults have no such expectation, and many of them have witnessed the aftermath of putting too much faith in an employer both through their parents and grandparents.

3. Declining needs for capital. It's been said repeatedly, but it's just so much cheaper to start up a company.